Refrain | Poems
by Rebecca Foust

Your cat curled at the door, tongue like a dark liver
thrust through her teeth,
poisoned by eating a mouse that had eaten d-CON,
click—your son’s testicular lump
overnight has tripled-in-size—whirr-click. The kid
who tossed your morning paper?
Blown up, his third tour in Iraq, and what is that click-
whirr-click, like-a-dry-insect sound?
Where the world was intact now grins a wound,
there’s a hole in the hull and you list.
Click-whir-click—below your feet, fracked bedrock
shifts. Click—the pixels pull in—whirr-click.
Now you can see them resolve, the pixeled years,
inside the framed sum of your fears.
He’s come. There’s a boy in the hall with a Glock
and crossed bandoliers.

I’ve been with you on “Progress Trap,”
ever since I understood washing machines
meant we could change sheets every week
instead of month. And that Hoovers allow
no more excuses for dirt anywhere.
I give you TV is evil, and Facebook a leech
gorged on the silver ichor of time.
And I guess one can read Kaczynski
for his ideas on progress, leaving out the bits
where he blew to bits
the fingers of postal workers and teachers.
But I won’t give you that that green line
glowing the edge of the bare hedgerow,
or the bloom, sudden, single, and lush
on the magnolia. Nor the twenty-three bones
in each human hand, its own wondrous machine.
Nor your weird, inward-turned schadenfreude
so close to gloating, going on and on about
The Harvest. Coming. And your singing scythe.

often in the dawn or dusk
and one night by moonlight
I saw them
picking a delicate way
down a bending path
no one else could see
ripple of silver leaves
and out stepped a fawn
shy as my fey boy
all long limbs dark eyes
and twitch of one ear
in the still canyon air
they lived there once
a family of mule deer
they lived there

What does the loon cry out to the lake
and the lake repeat to the rain?
The birds sing high in the old pine,
but this cabin’s wide floorboards are like
a betrayal: raw, white as bone,
still sticky with sap. We compost, we sort
trash disappeared by SUV transport
to a plant where nothing alive is sown
or grows. Except for the black dotted line
of crows, pecking at human alluvium,
paper and plastic massing a mountain
we finally cannot not see. What does the loon
cry out to the lake, the lake repeat to the rain?
What is the meaning of any refrain?

Child, your taper is so slender
and burns so hot
in this wind like a wall of asphalt.
Your hands cup
the paper plate into a skiff to float
you away from the continent
of one man’s hunger. Your eyes
are flame, so full
of his pain, I cannot bear to look in.
Because of you I must look in.
His eyes are blue, too. He tells
his name—Tampa—and each call
he heard at dawn in the brush:
Mockingbird. Robin. Chickadee. Thrush.

Rebecca Foust’s “Bee Fugue,” also known as Mudlark Flash No. 52 (2009), was included in her most recent book, God, Seed, which won the 2010 Foreword Book Award and was a finalist for the Mass Book Award. Other books of hers include All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song (2010 Many Mountains Moving Book Award), two chapbooks, and a new manuscript recently shortlisted for the Dorset and Kathryn A. Morton prizes. She has new poems in current or forthcoming issues of The Cincinnati Review, The Hudson Review, Narrative, North American Review, Sewanee Review, and other journals; essays and book reviews in American Book Review, Calyx, Poetry Flash, Prairie Schooner, Rumpus, and elsewhere; and a short story in the current issue of Chautauqua Journal.